Introduction:
This section gives a more complete overview of my ideas, outlining the main concepts and how they fit together. The rest of the website explores each idea in depth.
Almost everyone agrees that each person’s mix of emotion and intellect is what makes us unique. So, let’s begin with emotion.
Emotion: Why it’s so important
Emotions influence virtually every aspect of human life, leaving no part of our experience untouched. They have a direct impact on both body and mind, affecting almost every bodily system, influencing our thinking, and determining our reactions to what happens around us. Emotions aren’t just what we feel in the moment. They are lasting forces that define who we are and how we live.
To show just how pervasive and important emotions are, here are a few examples from the countless ways they shape human life:
Body and health : Emotions affect every organ system in the body: the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, bowel, brain, and every other system that keeps us alive.
Attention, memory, and learning: Emotions steer what we pay attention to, what sticks in our memory, and how well we concentrate. Strong emotions narrow focus and make learning more difficult.
Intelligence : Emotions affect how clearly people think and how easily they solve problems, which directly shapes intelligence.
Decision-making: Emotions influence judgment in powerful ways. Fear encourages caution, while anger or entitlement can lead to impulsive choices that affect careers, finances, and safety.
Creativity and curiosity : Joy and wonder open the door to curiosity, fueling the urge to explore, imagine, and create. Anxiety and discouragement shut that door, leaving little space for invention or playful thinking.
Addiction: Unpleasant emotions drive people to use substances in an effort to feel better.
Long-term health and resilience: Emotions influence how quickly the body recovers from illness and physical setbacks.
Relationships and social behavior: Emotions shape how people respond to one another. They influence trust, intimacy, cooperation, and conflict in everyday life.
But where do these emotions come from? The answer lies in childhood.
How children acquire emotions
(The following is a somewhat simplified explanation of a fairly complex process)
Here are two common ways children acquire emotional reactions:
When a child watches their parents expressing emotion, they mimic that emotion.
When a parent expresses negative emotion toward a child, the child reacts with the opposite emotion. For example, if a parent directs anger at a child, the child experiences fear.
Both the emotional reaction and the situation are stored in the child's memory. The more a child experiences a particular emotional reaction, the more easily that emotion is evoked in future interactions. In addition, those emotions become active all the time and create the person’s general emotional tone. I call these baseline emotions. (Note: this idea is not generally accepted by current researchers.)
Those experiences often generalize. That means that when a child experiences a similar situation but with someone who is not their parent, they respond according to how similar to the situation is to situations they experienced with their parents that evoked emotion.
Here are some examples:
If parents direct a lot of anger to a child, the child will experience fear and then tend to overreact to situations perceived as threatening, such as if a teacher expresses disapproval toward them.
A child who is often shamed or yelled at by parents develops anxiety about peer judgment. In group activities, even minor teasing or criticism by classmates leads to disproportionate distress, withdrawal, or defensive behaviors
Children exposed to frequent parental anger may interpret any stern tone or facial expression from adults (e.g., coaches, neighbors) as threatening, triggering anxiety or avoidance—even if no real threat is present.
As you can see, emotion is a huge part of what makes us what we are. The other major part is intellect, which I discuss next.
Intellect
Intellect is the thinking side of the mind. It includes how we make sense of information and the beliefs that guide our understanding. In this section, I focus specifically on beliefs.
Children form beliefs through their interactions with the world around them. Most experiences fade without leaving a trace, but when an encounter stirs emotion, it is more likely to be remembered and crystallized into a belief. Because similar situations can evoke different feelings, children often develop beliefs that contradict each other. For example, a child may meet a friendly stranger at a playground and form the belief that strangers are kind, but later encounter a threatening stranger in a dark alley and conclude that strangers are dangerous. Children remember both situations and keep them separate by tying each one to what was different in the environment: what they saw, what they heard, or what they touched.
Emotions and beliefs acquired during childhood are stored in the brain. Together, these form part of what researchers call schemas. I will discuss them next.
Schemas
When the brain stores an emotional experience or a belief, it gets linked with many other memories of similar experiences. Over time, these linked memories form larger patterns, called schemas. A schema acts like a mental map: it helps us recognize situations, predict what might happen, and determine how we respond. Schemas formed during childhood determine much of what we think, feel, and do throughout adulthood.
Adult life
Researchers generally agree that the combination of acquired emotions and beliefs into a schemas determine much of what we think, feel, and do throughout adulthood, as I stated above. However, here are some of my beliefs that current researchers do not agree with:
The wide range of baseline emotions and emotional reactions acquired during childhood completely determine subsequent adult emotions.
All adult beliefs must be consistent with beliefs acquired during childhood.
Emotions and beliefs acquired during childhood never change once a person becomes an adult.
All important human traits are caused by childhood experience and have little if any genetic influence.
Researchers agree that virtually every important human trait other than physical characteristics develop to some significant degree from environment, and many researchers believe that there are significant flaws in genetic research making the conclusions suspect. Consequently, there is no broadly accepted research that proves me wrong. I will discuss this in more detail on another page.
Putting it all together
I'll go through some of my claims explain how child experience completely determines them.
Intelligence:
Emotion has many direct effects on the brain's ability to attend to the environment, take in information, process that information, and remember it. I believe that these effects are large enough to account for all of the differences seen in intelligence.
Personality:
Every personality trait can be explained by different combinations of emotion or childhood experience. Here are some examples:
Pride causes someone to be outgoing
Fear causes someone to be shy
Someone who is emotionally stimulated may talk a lot
More intimate emotions produce caring
Children who received attention for being funny or likely to attempt to be funny as adults
Children who received attention for talking a lot are likely to be talkative as adults
Children who were ignored a lot are likely to be angry when ignored as an adult
Psychiatric disorders:
Psychiatric disorders are defined by groups of symptoms that last a specified length of time.
Psychiatric symptoms are:
Emotional, such as feeling depressed or anxious,
Physical, such as low energy or sleep problems, or
Mental, such as the thought that people “hate me.”
Emotion can cause both the emotional and physical symptoms of psychiatric disorders.
The mental aspects of psychiatric disorders are beliefs required during childhood.
Psychiatric symptoms are commonly found in people who have no psychiatric disorder. For example, many people intermittently experience sleep, energy, and anxiety problems, blue moods, and negative self thoughts.
Thus, all of the symptoms of psychiatric disorders can be caused by emotions or beliefs acquired during childhood
Medical problems:
The direct effect of emotion on the body can produce medical problems.
Summary:
In the same way, almost every human trait could be produced by childhood experience.
Note: I am not claiming to have proven that all of this comes from childhood experience. My goal here is to show how it is possible that all of these things could develop from childhood experience alone and to show you the mechanisms that could cause this.
The change process
To fully understand the change process, I need to briefly explain imprinted faces. Faces that babies look at a lot during their first six or so months of life become permanently imprinted. Most or all of the emotions that those babies acquire during their childhood come from interactions with those people whose faces are imprinted. When an adult looks at a picture of a person whose face is imprinted, the emotions acquired from interactions with that person during childhood are evoked. (Note: you can try this out yourself to experience what I mean.)
The more a person looks at pictures of people who are imprinted and experiences the emotions, the less intense those emotions become.
This is exactly like exposure therapy, one of the most effective therapies known. Exposure therapy works by exposing someone in a safe setting to whatever is causing their emotion. The more the person is exposed in a safe setting, the less intense their emotional reaction becomes. This is exactly what happens when looking at pictures of people who are imprinted. Initial emotional reactions are typically quite strong, but overtime they decrease. And both the baseline emotions and emotional reactions decrease in strength as time goes on.
As those emotions decrease, the problems that caused also decrease. In addition, the beliefs that are tied to those emotions are held less firmly and eventually may be given up if current information suggests that they are wrong.